Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has announced that his country would withdraw from the first official talks, due to start on Thursday in Qatar with the Taliban and the Americans.

Afghan officials said they were furious that the Taliban’s office in the capital Doha was accredited to the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”, the name used by the Taliban when they held power from 1996 to 2001.

Even if the Afghan president does relent, expectations are low that the talks will deliver a political settlement of the sort that was hoped for when the first overtures were made to the insurgents five years ago.

The leading author of the report said that at best the talks could provide a “sticking plaster” to the departure of Nato forces by the end of 2014.

A group of British and American experts from King’s College London and the New America Foundation in Washington said efforts at arbitration over the past few years had been a “chaos of good intentions”, with different branches of the international community pushing different agendas at the same time.

“The strategic rationale for talks has never been clear,” said the report, Talking to the Taliban, Hope over History?

It said that some people wanted to “peel off” low level insurgents, whereas others wanted to go straight to the top and talk to Mullah Mohammed Omar. Some wanted to call a cease fire while others wanted to continue killing Taliban members. Others hoped to encourage the development of a Taliban political party.

At different stages, representatives of the United Nations, European Union, the British, American and German intelligence services, not to mention the US military, were involved in efforts to contact the Taliban at various levels and in various locations.

“There were too many cooks, and not enough strategic direction,” said John Bew, the leading author on the report and director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) at King’s.

“The whole process has been too secretive, when we should have been open about talks and clear leadership should have been provided. Like the whole campaign, it wasn’t clear why we were doing what we were doing.

“If you can’t define the mission, how can you define why you are going to talk to these people?”

The chances of a last minute political breakthrough were slim, the report said, and in many ways “echoed the experience of the Soviet Union trying to negotiate itself out of Afghanistan”.

The Russians failed and saw their appointed government toppled after their departure in a bitter civil war. The Afghan armed forces are now thought to be more durable than those left in charge in 1989, but will be exposed by exit of Nato forces that at their peak numbered 144,000.

Mr Bew said that the Doha dialogue had some chance of success, but only because its goals were so limited.

“There could be a successful sticking plaster aspect to these talks. The Taliban could agree to disassociate from al-Qaeda, and the talks could nurture the Taliban into party politics after Karzai’s term is up in 2014,” he said.

Washington will still retain some relevance around the negotiating table, he said, because it can still hurt the Taliban with drone strikes and night raids. But as every month passes on the way to Nato’s exit date, its leverage will suffer.

In making significant concessions to get to the negotiating table, Washington had limited its aims to those it started out with when it entered the country in 2001 to punish the Taliban for refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden.

“The US is back to its basic reason for being in Afghanistan, which is stopping al-Qaeda. Winning hearts and minds has gone, counter-insurgency has gone. This is now a containment exercise,” said Mr Bew.